Re: Development Speed

[Stefan Kangas]

xenodasein--- via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
writes:

> I also wonder why, and this subject might need it's own thread.  My first
> guess is that their code is more approachable, whatever all that entails.

If there is a lack of contributors, I guess code quality can contribute
to that.  But I'd strongly suspect that instead of looking for a fix at
the source code level, there are social and cultural reasons why many
find it hard to contribute to Emacs.

However, I don't really think it's correct to say that we have a lack of
contributors:

    https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-08-13.png

What I observe instead is that we have many people who should be in a
position to contribute to Emacs core, but for one reason or another
choose not to.  Instead, they develop third-party packages on MELPA (or,
more recently, NonGNU ELPA).

One thing we have discussed over and over is moving to sourcehut, but
AFAIK no one is working seriously on that.  I really hope that someone
will take on that task soon.  Maybe Lars or Eli would like to put it at
the top of etc/TODO (on the emacs-28 branch) on the off chance that it
helps.